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花嫁はお買得
Troy Belvoir walked into Lady Morva's life and took it over. But just why had he married her? Was she really just part of a business contract? Or did his marriage vows mean something to him?
- GenresHarlequin RomanceRomance
Paperback Shinsho
First published April 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 31, 2017
I'm not gonna lie. This was one weirdly fascinating story that failed on so many levels but kept me reading.
Why?
The plot - Sheltered, English virgin heroine is forced to marry the Canadian heir to their estate after the family finds out her older brother was born a year before her parent's marriage. (WW II is the reason cited for delaying the nuptials, which makes no sense). The evil granny has verbally abused the heroine so she has no will or backbone of her own. The rich Canadian hero decides to monetize the estate by turning it into an upscale resort so he's too busy to spend much time with the heroine. Heroine falls in love with him and tries to get over her shyness, but she keeps messing it up. There's also a subplot with her estranged mother who abandoned the heroine at age 3. Her older brother, who is pushing 40, acts like a spoiled brat of 18 and angles to marry a rich former girlfriend of the H's.
The caricatures:
The snobby aristocrat: Heroine's granny is an evil snob who has gotten her way her whole life by browbeating everyone in their path. Tells the heroine to basically lie back and think of England on her wedding day.
The lightweight and snobby lord who hasn't worked a day in his life: That would the heroine's brother who tries to browbeat the heroine into all sorts of schemes against the hero - and when that doesn't work takes up with a rich social climber. Also male chauvinist who doesn't see why women would want to be equals when they can be up on a pedestal.
The grasping social climber: Former girlfriend of hero - no class as she's from the wrong side of the Atlantic.
The militant feminist: Aunt of the hero who never married and arrives by helicopter. Author missed a huge opportunity of not putting her and granny in the same room to duke it out.
The free love mother : She tells the heroine that the "modern" woman can ask for sex of her husband anytime, thus startling our still-a-virgin-after-months-of-marriage heroine.
The noble savage/colonial: The Canadian hero at first sounds like an extra from The Beverly Hillbillies. I'm just surprised he didn't decide to install a "Sea Mint pond" for his guests. Then he shows his cunning by getting his own way and revealing how rich he is. Later on his dialogue changes and he describes the heroine in the most flowery way possible and invoking an "Indian" legend about birds.
Which brings me to . . .
The prose:
The prose, captain, she is purple. Deadly purple. Here's the heroine trying to vamp it up for her reluctant husband:
But would men's eyes remain lowered, she fretted painfully, or would they lift to linger upon a daring expanse of naked shoulders and curving breasts threatening to spill pale as cream from overfilled cups?
'Here, put this on!' As if Aunt Cassie had also begun doubting the wisdom of too much exposure, she hastened to fasten a diamante collar around Morva's vulnerable young neck then stepped back, her gaze drawn as if magnetised towards a pointed pendant hanging like a warning to wandering eyes to avoid the hazard of venturing too far over snow white slopes, of risking a slide down a deep, mysterious plunge.
Did you get all of that?
This story would have been so much fun if it hadn't been marred with clunky dialogue and long passages like that.
But I had to keep reading because of the Weirdness.
Heroine's mother has a room in her house she has filled with the gifts for the heroine over the years. There are dolls and skates and ball gowns and designer cocktail dresses. It's even weirder when you find out that she is within driving distance of the heroine, that she saw the heroine's brother, and she had visitation rights but never contacted the heroine.
The catering staff think it's a good idea to set up a Western Saloon night for their overseas guests and to stage a dramatic retelling of how the hero's great grandfather picked out a hooker to marry.
Romance? Pfft. Who needs romance when we have this much weirdness in a 187 page story.
Why?
The plot - Sheltered, English virgin heroine is forced to marry the Canadian heir to their estate after the family finds out her older brother was born a year before her parent's marriage. (WW II is the reason cited for delaying the nuptials, which makes no sense). The evil granny has verbally abused the heroine so she has no will or backbone of her own. The rich Canadian hero decides to monetize the estate by turning it into an upscale resort so he's too busy to spend much time with the heroine. Heroine falls in love with him and tries to get over her shyness, but she keeps messing it up. There's also a subplot with her estranged mother who abandoned the heroine at age 3. Her older brother, who is pushing 40, acts like a spoiled brat of 18 and angles to marry a rich former girlfriend of the H's.
The caricatures:
The snobby aristocrat: Heroine's granny is an evil snob who has gotten her way her whole life by browbeating everyone in their path. Tells the heroine to basically lie back and think of England on her wedding day.
The lightweight and snobby lord who hasn't worked a day in his life: That would the heroine's brother who tries to browbeat the heroine into all sorts of schemes against the hero - and when that doesn't work takes up with a rich social climber. Also male chauvinist who doesn't see why women would want to be equals when they can be up on a pedestal.
The grasping social climber: Former girlfriend of hero - no class as she's from the wrong side of the Atlantic.
The militant feminist: Aunt of the hero who never married and arrives by helicopter. Author missed a huge opportunity of not putting her and granny in the same room to duke it out.
The free love mother : She tells the heroine that the "modern" woman can ask for sex of her husband anytime, thus startling our still-a-virgin-after-months-of-marriage heroine.
The noble savage/colonial: The Canadian hero at first sounds like an extra from The Beverly Hillbillies. I'm just surprised he didn't decide to install a "Sea Mint pond" for his guests. Then he shows his cunning by getting his own way and revealing how rich he is. Later on his dialogue changes and he describes the heroine in the most flowery way possible and invoking an "Indian" legend about birds.
Which brings me to . . .
The prose:
The prose, captain, she is purple. Deadly purple. Here's the heroine trying to vamp it up for her reluctant husband:
But would men's eyes remain lowered, she fretted painfully, or would they lift to linger upon a daring expanse of naked shoulders and curving breasts threatening to spill pale as cream from overfilled cups?
'Here, put this on!' As if Aunt Cassie had also begun doubting the wisdom of too much exposure, she hastened to fasten a diamante collar around Morva's vulnerable young neck then stepped back, her gaze drawn as if magnetised towards a pointed pendant hanging like a warning to wandering eyes to avoid the hazard of venturing too far over snow white slopes, of risking a slide down a deep, mysterious plunge.
Did you get all of that?
This story would have been so much fun if it hadn't been marred with clunky dialogue and long passages like that.
But I had to keep reading because of the Weirdness.
Heroine's mother has a room in her house she has filled with the gifts for the heroine over the years. There are dolls and skates and ball gowns and designer cocktail dresses. It's even weirder when you find out that she is within driving distance of the heroine, that she saw the heroine's brother, and she had visitation rights but never contacted the heroine.
The catering staff think it's a good idea to set up a Western Saloon night for their overseas guests and to stage a dramatic retelling of how the hero's great grandfather picked out a hooker to marry.
Romance? Pfft. Who needs romance when we have this much weirdness in a 187 page story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2018
Lady Morva’s daddy the Earl dies, and whoopsie, looks like he wasn’t married to Morva’s mother until after his son Percy was born, so now the title and castle are going to Canadian lumberjack Troy. Morva, her grandmother informs her, will have to marry Troy so the family doesn’t get thrown out of the castle. And, Percy must be given a company directorship. Preferably not in anything posh people won’t like, e.g. mining, and also something that doesn’t involve doing any work.
And while all of this sounds pretty standard romance, and Troy’s proposal is delightfully ‘let’s marry for dinner parties! I totally need you to do posh hostess stuff when the rich hotel guests start arriving,’ this book is crazy weird.
StMargaret’s review points out a lot of the weird, so I’ll try not to be too repetitive, but it’s like Margaret Rome, as well as pointing out the Edwardian-ness of her heroine, decided she should also use the most Edwardian language possible.
In the opening scene Morva is recounting the loss of her father and I at first thought she was reading his obituary, so it was disconcerting to discover she was talking to her horse. Characters in the book have a habit of delivering lectures to each other, and then either flouncing off, or there’s some kind of abrupt cut and now we’re somewhere else. Morva barely has anything to say, and is treated by everyone as Young Countess Barbie.
Troy is rich and proudly Canadian, and all about the raw outdoors and nature and man resting gold from the soil and felling trees and shooting some animals but not others, because they’re now endangered species. Morva describes him as a grisly bear and later, after he’s explained long-horned sheep to her, as a ram. Of course he fell in love with Morva at first sight and is cross with her for submitting to her bullying relatives, which: unfair.
Actually: super unfair. There’s this theme throughout romances with this plot that heroines like Morva must be shoved into standing up to their bullies or risk losing the cranky man who spends most of the time indifferent to her and flirting with someone else. You’re often left wishing she’d find a way to tell them all to get knotted.
And Morva has a particularly tough time, what with losing her father and then getting married to save her ungrateful grandmother and brother, and then reconnecting with the mother she hasn’t seen for 18 years while also having to watch her husband be nicer to another girl, and when she’s urged to make a more out there move to demonstrate she wants to win him over it’s a humiliating disaster.
Still, Troy the Canadian lumberjack-bear-ram isn’t the worst of his type, and Morva was frustrating in that she didn’t seem to have any future dreams, and the intrusions on her comfortable life, riding around giving speeches to her horse, were pretty minimal.
And while all of this sounds pretty standard romance, and Troy’s proposal is delightfully ‘let’s marry for dinner parties! I totally need you to do posh hostess stuff when the rich hotel guests start arriving,’ this book is crazy weird.
StMargaret’s review points out a lot of the weird, so I’ll try not to be too repetitive, but it’s like Margaret Rome, as well as pointing out the Edwardian-ness of her heroine, decided she should also use the most Edwardian language possible.
In the opening scene Morva is recounting the loss of her father and I at first thought she was reading his obituary, so it was disconcerting to discover she was talking to her horse. Characters in the book have a habit of delivering lectures to each other, and then either flouncing off, or there’s some kind of abrupt cut and now we’re somewhere else. Morva barely has anything to say, and is treated by everyone as Young Countess Barbie.
Troy is rich and proudly Canadian, and all about the raw outdoors and nature and man resting gold from the soil and felling trees and shooting some animals but not others, because they’re now endangered species. Morva describes him as a grisly bear and later, after he’s explained long-horned sheep to her, as a ram. Of course he fell in love with Morva at first sight and is cross with her for submitting to her bullying relatives, which: unfair.
Actually: super unfair. There’s this theme throughout romances with this plot that heroines like Morva must be shoved into standing up to their bullies or risk losing the cranky man who spends most of the time indifferent to her and flirting with someone else. You’re often left wishing she’d find a way to tell them all to get knotted.
And Morva has a particularly tough time, what with losing her father and then getting married to save her ungrateful grandmother and brother, and then reconnecting with the mother she hasn’t seen for 18 years while also having to watch her husband be nicer to another girl, and when she’s urged to make a more out there move to demonstrate she wants to win him over it’s a humiliating disaster.
Still, Troy the Canadian lumberjack-bear-ram isn’t the worst of his type, and Morva was frustrating in that she didn’t seem to have any future dreams, and the intrusions on her comfortable life, riding around giving speeches to her horse, were pretty minimal.
abrierto-to-read-hr-other
February 20, 2022She represented a noble investment
Lady Morva Eden was living proof the aristocracy's breeding program still existed. Once her family realized her brother's illegitimacy would cost them their nobility, they naturally turned to Morva.
And so for a price -- the ancestral home for her grandmother to live in and prestigious employment for the disentitled brother--Morva allowed herself to be practically sold to the new Earl of Howgill, a shrewd Canadian millionaire with an eye for bargains.
He planned to turn Ravenscrag into a lucrative tourist resort, but what did he have in mind for Morva
Lady Morva Eden was living proof the aristocracy's breeding program still existed. Once her family realized her brother's illegitimacy would cost them their nobility, they naturally turned to Morva.
And so for a price -- the ancestral home for her grandmother to live in and prestigious employment for the disentitled brother--Morva allowed herself to be practically sold to the new Earl of Howgill, a shrewd Canadian millionaire with an eye for bargains.
He planned to turn Ravenscrag into a lucrative tourist resort, but what did he have in mind for Morva
July 4, 2023
I read 2nd best bride as a teenager and harbor a sentimental fondness for the melodrama of Rome's plots and language. This one I did not like as much, not least due to the racial and ethnic references being pretty offensive. Read at your own risk.
April 11, 2021
There wasn't much romance in this book, to be honest. I couldn't feel a connection between Morva and Troy throughout the book. But I guess it's expected, this book was written over twenty years ago.
November 27, 2021
Margaret Rome is not a favorite author. Her men are more concerned with status and looking like winners and being the undisputed boss of the family. She also writes dialogue that would be too corny in a melodrama.
I couldn’t finish this one
I couldn’t finish this one
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews